Right now, there is an email sitting in my inbox. Seeing it there makes my. It’s not from a lover (or a hater), not from my mother, or someone I’m specifically trying to avoid because I said something that made her mad, or he said something that made me hate him a little bit. The email is from my thesis supervisor. It will be a small email, quite short I think, because she is busy and has other students to tend to. I haven’t opened it yet. But I can read the beginning … “my main suggestion would be”

My body takes up the tension like a sponge. Would be what? To just scrap the whole thing and start again? To just be better? To just give up? I am too proud for this, and my pride makes me anxious.

Deep breaths.

It’s just an email. It’s just words. Just pixels on a screen. Word are my friends, and so are pixels. No, words and I are more than friends. We go way back, back to when my father gave me my first note book and pen and told me I could write whatever I wanted in it. That was the root of it, the feeling I had when he gave me that book, when he gave me that freedom to create. It is the root of why I am still writing, of why I am am doing this stupid thesis in the first place.

But I am the worst with emails. I have deleted emails from people who have hurt me, and are trying to apologize. I’ve deleted emails from people who I’ve hurt, and cannot bear to read how and why. It is a sick coiling in my gut, to read those first few words, and only those, to scroll through the possibilities of what they could mean, and settle on the worst one. It is cowardly to obliterate their carefully thought out lines, and the time they have spent crafting them. Now they are just floating through space, unread, like unseen stars, and even the thought of that makes the bile bubble up.

Maybe I’ll walk to the Blackheart and Sparrow, buy myself one of those nice imported beers, the ones they keep up the back, and cost the same as a whole bottle of wine. Maybe I’ll take it home, maybe I’ll sit at my desk, maybe I’ll take a long sip before I open that email.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I think. Maybe this is just a chamomile tea situation.

One response to “High Anxiety: I’ve Got Mail”

So I opened the email re: my thesis proposal. It reads; “My main suggestion would be to maybe include a reference to some of the scholars working in the field here and there, but otherwise, it all makes sense and I can approve it.”